The governing body of the Santo Domingo Autonomous University (UASD) voted to suspend instruction and close the campus until Friday as a response to the violence that erupted there yesterday. Members of militant student organizations, some of whom had been previously suspended for similar incitements, confronted university security members, and later police. Four were reported injured and were hospitalized. Students were attempting to suspend yesterday?s voting in a plebiscite known as the ?University Claustro,? by means of which new university-wide regulations were to have been accepted. Some 3,000 persons, including administrators, and elected representatives of professors, staff and students are eligible to vote. Due to intrusion by demonstrators in the polling places, voting was suspended after just 750 ballots had been cast. Ballot boxes in the Science Faculty building were set ablaze. Streets around the sprawling campus, in a placid southwest neighborhood of Santo Domingo, were closed to traffic. Along the two major thoroughfares that skirt the campus – Independencia and Jose Contreras Avenues, as well as on nearby Bolivar and George Washington Avenues – traffic built up rapidly. Between the hours of 1:00 and 5:00 p.m., the pace of vehicular movement slowed to a crawl. Clouds of tear gas floated through the area. The UASD?s President, Miguel Rosado, said that student groups would not be allowed to wrest control of the University. The governing body of the University will convene today at an off-campus location to decide on measures to be taken against those who instigated the disturbances. The UASD is the DR?s oldest, largest, and only public, university, enrolling more than 125,000 students.
